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Feature Article
Exploration of a "Gap": Strategising Gender Equity in African Universities
Jane Bennett

Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to
question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down
this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a
process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the
story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men,
this story is how it all began. (Tsitsi Dangarembga) [1]

Introduction

In the 14 years since Dangarembga published Nervous Conditions, a novel piercingly astute
about the implications of education for black girls skewered within colonial architectures, the
realities of gender for access to primary, secondary and higher education in African contexts
have struggled for recognition within critical debates on democracy and development. The
struggle has been driven by strong voices: N'dri Assie-Lumumba (1993), Mamphela
Ramphele (1995a; 1995b), Rudo Gaidzanwa (1997), Marjorie Mbilinyi and Patricia Mbughuni
(1991), to name a mere handful of the writers who have, in the past decade, sought to
unpack the knots of gender, race, ethnicity, nation-building, and post-colonial economic
urgencies which so complicate access to education on the continent.

The struggle has also been galvanised by the experiences of women not different from those
loved by Tambudzai, the protagonist of Dangarembga's novel: her mother, loathing the
separation between elders and children which followed a child's entrance into "education",
and yet often fighting for her daughter's right to choose the desk; Lucia, who fearlessly crafts
an independent route into "womanhood" without leaving her family and without access to
class-mobility; Maiguru, with a Masters Degree in Philosophy and an emotionally abusive
patriarch of a husband; and Nyasha, poisoned until near-death by the "bloody lies"
(Dangarembga, 1988: 201) of history books written in English. These figures testify to the
complexity underlying demands for gender equity as an integral facet of policies and
positions dedicated to sustaining strong educational infrastructures within different African
countries. For many of the women in Dangarembga's novel, "gender equity" is clearly much
more than a neat phrase encompassing the notion of "balance" and the gesture towards
redress in five syllables; it suggests the tale of something simply begun.

At a workshop on higher education in Africa, funded and initiated by the Ford Foundation in
June, 2001, participants (many of whom were at an executive level within their own
institutions) were asked to spend some time in silence, "dreaming" of the African University
as it might be in fifty years' time. Participants were asked to speak to their "dreams", which
were reported [2] as encompassing volatile and dynamic diversity (lecturers who are chiefs
in traditional dress alongside computerised interconnectivity); flexible and ethical boundaries;
the power of self-discovery and African-centered knowledge making; and - despite the
"nightmare of the present" - the hope of self-reliance and good health. The dynamic most
often highlighted by participants concerned the African-Northern axis of historical
destabilisation and disempowerment. The only reported dream explicitly naming a relation to
gender includes a daughter: "She's 57 years old and I accompany her to some of her
classes. She's never been raped, she's never been abused…she's never been told she's too
black…although she's 57 years old, she's not damaged and she's highly creative." [3] It is
noteworthy that gender moves into the dream through rape, through a hint of the tensions
inherent in entering a particular institutional context as a black woman, and through a
longing for sustained creativity.
This paper reflects on the central themes of this dream by exploring some current thinking
on the way in which dominant forces in African universities have opened up possibilities for
strategising gender equity within institutional contexts, and considers the potential of policies
on gender equity for actual transformational shifts within the consciousness and core
business of different African-based universities. The first section of the paper, "Gender and
African universities", describes the gendered nature of institutions of higher education within
African contexts. The argument names the influence of globalisation and market-driven
strategies on pedagogy, the management of education, and the formation of alliances with
donor-driven research and policy programmes. The ways in which gender influences the
possibilities of employment, knowledge-production, and identities are noted through an
examination of the internal organising processes of universities, processes which - on the
whole - elude quantification. These issues, while critical to an understanding of gender within
institutional space, were not those first raised by gender activists in universities on the
continent in the early and mid-1980s. Some of the analyses of these gender activists are
noted, and the section closes with the suggestion that certain dynamics, usually central to
the process of becoming gendered, have been given relatively little attention by theorists of
equity. I demonstrate that the importance of heterosexual practices, and individuals' routes
into masculinity, womanhood, and the family should be integrated into analyses of the way in
which higher education interacts with local, and national contexts.

During the past decade, there has been rich review of the challenges for gender equity in
higher educational sites in Africa. Much of this work highlights the poor ratio of women to
men (especially at management levels), gender differences in student selection of courses
and career paths, and the power of misogynies as complex and debilitating variables in
institutional cultures. The description of some policy-based initiatives in different countries
aims to address issues identified as problem areas for gender equity. The second section of
the paper, "Strategies for 'gender equity' within higher education", seeks to summarise key
conversations on the nature of gender equity policy interventions. I note in this section that
these conversations concentrate on various forms of affirmative action (setting quotas for
women students, crediting women students with extra course credit, or establishing "targets"
for appropriate numbers of women staff, especially at management level), and highlight the
variable impact of these interventions.

"The 'lens' of sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus", the last part of the paper,
uses two case-study explorations of sexual harassment and sexual violence in particular
African university settings to concretise the suggestion that problems of "gender equity"
cannot be located simply within the demographics of institutions. The section also
demonstrates the inadequacy of fixating on the national contexts that influence gender
equity, and highlights the extent to which critical locations within national contexts, such as,
for example, "poor", "urban", "nationalist", "man", "Muslim" or "Swahili-speaking" are
negotiated long before any individual reaches the gates of a university. These are, in
themselves, not new positions. The paper's more original contribution comes in its analysis
of the politics of sexual harassment as a zone through which university staff and students
can be seen, at various levels, to negotiate the genders they need for survival. That a
woman's gender may continue, in many institutional settings, to create professional,
personal and political vulnerabilities does not always translate into clear-cut consensus
within institutional contexts that "gender equity" is a viable route towards employment,
status, individual safety, or citizenship. Clearly, national and local institutional contexts have
a dramatic impact on universities' approaches to realistic gender-equity. The paper
concludes by considering ways in which such differences both complicate theory on gender
equity within higher education and challenge those feminists who continue to advocate for a
change in African universities' thinking about women and men.
Given its exploratory nature, the paper ranges broadly over the terrain of universities in
different African contexts. Limited by constraints of length, language, and experience, [4] I
have been conscious in writing of the possibility of over-generalisation and of the risks of a
wide-angled lens: limited knowledge of critical detail, concentration on one landscape,
simplistic comparison, and thin (as opposed to "thick") description. Because of the number of
excellent researchers in the field, I am, however, assured of correction where it is needed.
The paper is thus offered as a route towards further discussion of the implications of taking
gender seriously within university buildings and bodies.

Gender and African universities

In 1995, Katherine Namuddu challenged African-based academies to accelerate radically

their approaches to addressing the massive gender gaps in students and staff on most
campuses. Her proposals were concrete: ensure that women are granted admission into
courses through predetermined quotas; head-hunt women for advertised academic and
management positions; where necessary, design capacity-building programmes for women;
introduce and implement policies on sexual harassment; identify, track, and nurture strong
women students for development; ensure that good women candidates for higher positions
are duly promoted (Namuddu, 1995: 56). The definitive call for affirmative action spoke to
nearly two decades' work on the recognition that gender had a profound impact on the
educational experiences of women and girls and that the intellectual environment was
permeated with barriers, androcentric analyses, and depletion.

While Namuddu focuses on the ratios of women to men and the need to increase the
number of women and girls in education, others have drawn attention to the ingrained
structural, social and political factors that constrain this increase. Key voices in the
articulation of gender inequities within African higher education have always embedded their
analysis in consideration of the numerous legacies and circumstances that have shaped
formal institutions, ranging from primary schools through to universities, colleges, and
technikons. For example, Rudo Gaidzanwa's (1997) exploration of the poor ratio of women
to men academics and students at the University of Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s links
"gender gaps" to a range of factors: colonial legacies of education at all levels of society;
nationalist forces which led to democracy in 1980; the impact of structural adjustment
programmes on government budgets, and the mercurial dynamics of gender itself. In the
context of a post-Chimurenga discourse that powerfully embedded gendered identities in
citizenship and familial identity, women and girls (whose options and roles had in many
cases been radically transformed during the war years) were coerced back into conservative
domesticity. They therefore seemed to be less welcome in educational zones after 1983
than they were before and during the war of liberation. In her recent book, Joy Kwesiga
restates and tables the statistics of ratio to conclude: "Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest
enrolment rates in the world at all levels of education for both males and females, with
females' rates being lower than the males"(2002: 48). She goes on to review theory on the
meaning of educational access and covers issues at three interlocking sites: the family, the
state, and the educational institution itself.

The impact of poverty links all three sites. Statistics prepared by the Forum of African
Women Educators for the Conference in Beijing in 1995 suggest that poor families hesitate
to pull children from potential wage labour into schooling, especially where the children are
girls. State economic policies which privilege privatisation, and tend to obliterate small-scale
subsistence operations of agriculture and trade, offer no resources to cash-strapped
households. Masculinities are more readily adaptable to new modes of agriculture. For
example, men are targeted as development groundbreakers and tend to control the terms of
seed-purchase and crop-sale, while most women are still expected to bear the burden of
reproductive subsistence as well as contributing to cash-crop delivery and trading. Mobility
across the border of poverty is impeded for all children by state failures to subsidise
education, transport, health care and food, but girls are especially vulnerable to family care-
taking responsibilities and culturally-rooted expectations about their identities and roles
within reproduction. Kwesiga (2002) thus opens her discussion on educational access by
exploring the fact that poverty paralyses opportunity, and that ethnic or religious
marginalisation can also impact negatively on children's hopes for schooling.

Discussion of gender disparities therefore deserves to be connected to context-specific

histories of the interplay of class, ethnicity and race. The clearest examples of the
explanatory power of detailed histories come from analyses of educational systems in South
Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, where national educational policy explicitly drew on crude
categorisations of race and ethnicity to manage education at all levels, including university
level. Within every context, the impact of gender will be negotiated through multiple
variables, each responsive to the particular global, national, and local forces influencing
basic questions of resources in one locale. While questions of male-female ratios tend to
dominate broad-based research on gender and African higher education (driven often by
advocacy and policy interests), context-specific studies illuminate the "gender-gap" as a
narrative shot through with the complications of rural/urban divides, competition for location
within elites established by colonial and/or post-"democratic" pockets of huge privilege, and
the demands of markets whose priorities respond to Northern economic trajectories and
interests. There is no doubt that within most African-based universities, women students are
outnumbered by men, [5] that staff - particularly at management levels - are overwhelmingly
men, and that participation in disciplines tends to correspond to outdated scripts about
gendered professionalism. Which women students are outnumbered, which men are
retaining disproportionate levels of power within different institutions, and why ameliorative
and affirmative action policies make so little headway remain questions well worth much
deeper analysis.

Connections between the shape, accessibility, and policies of primary and secondary
schooling and universities in different countries are clearly heavily implicated in any
discussion of gender and higher education. [6] The history of the higher education system is,
in itself, worth brief description for an understanding of how imperatives concerning gender
and equity find themselves battling for self-sustainability in the face of urgent concerns about
the current state of many universities. In the past forty years, linked to the overthrow of
colonial regimes, the establishment of national agendas for new state formations under the
ever-watchful eyes of Northern policy-makers (located within multilateral donor agencies and
within the state), higher education has rapidly expanded. In 1960, sub-Saharan Africa
boasted 13 universities, 7 of which were inside South Africa. In 2002, there are about 300
universities on the continent; this figure excluding teachers' training colleges, technical
colleges, agricultural colleges, colleges of nursing education and diploma-granting
institutions offering skills in business administration, media, computer programming and
management, and creative arts. A cadre of African intellectuals has consistently monitored,
interrogated, and analysed this expansion, taking note of the unravelling tensions between
local resources and globalisation, between the need for African graduates and the increasing
difficulty of assuring employment for those graduates, and between the epistemological need
for contextually-driven knowledge and the lure of North-centric analyses of science, labour,
government, society and identity. [7] During the past few years, in countries where
government resources cannot begin to address higher education's needs, privatised
universities have begun to be established, deepening class and often religious divides, and
creating zones of education relatively impermeable to policies on equity.

The emphasis on the salience of gender in strategic research and advocacy in African higher
education may, in the mid-1990s, have become wrapped into a quantitative tale of numbers,
ratios, and "gaps". On this score, it is worth noting that where initiatives arose to challenge
local institutions on questions of gender, they were rarely initially articulated as concerns
about sex ratios on campuses. Overwhelmingly, despite the disparities of nation, colonial
heritages, independence trajectories, and locale among different African universities,
analysis of gender dynamics within these institutions suggests that three issues catalysed
outrage, theory, and activism.

The first was an intellectual challenge to the almost complete absence of gender analysis as
a key tool of social research in curricula and research. The trivialisation of women's
experiences, the implications of the absolute conflation of the term "person" and the word
"man", and the staggering indifference to calls for research which acknowledged the power
of gender, led to the formation of independent research and advocacy networks. These
included Women in Nigeria (WIN), women's groups at the University of Dar es Salaam
concerned with research [8] and the Association of African Women in Research and
Development (AAWORD), founded in 1977 to counteract the hostility and isolation faced by
African-based women researchers, scholars, and writers continentally. The absence of
gendered realities from the "core business" of universities (the work of knowledge
production) formed a central platform of activism in the mid-1980s. [9]

A second issue highlighted by gender activism on campuses in the 1980s centred around
reproductive labour. Sylvia Tamale and Joe Oloka-Onyango state the case boldly: "Women
academics carry a dual burden that directly affects their freedom to operate and articulate
issues in the academy. This burden is that women must pursue both their academic
obligations while meeting traditional obligations" (2000:5). "Traditional obligations" entail
labour-intensive child-care, household management, support for the elderly, and so on.
Fifteen or so years earlier, it was primarily on campuses where there were sufficient women
employed as academics (rather than as poorly paid, and institutionally powerless,
administrative staff), that the "dual burden" could become an advocacy issue. This happened
at the University of Dar es Salaam, and also within some South African universities. At the
University of Cape Town, for example, an "ad-hoc" group of women, spearheaded by
activism from feminist academics, insisted on the provision of a crèche on campus. At the
University of the Western Cape, a Women's Internal Committee was formed, seeking to rally
all women on the campus - administrative staff, faculty, and students - around the issues of
maternity leave, child care facilities, and benefits which could accommodate family needs for
health and housing. [10] This trend of activism and the accompanying analyses of gender
dynamics within the institution evoke new questions about the "core business" of
universities. Gendered distress around women's structural disadvantage (built into
conditions of service, ignorance of reproductive labour, and the impossibility of research-
based creativity under expectations of "dual labour") indicates that the "core business" of
institutional practice involves segregating academic work from family networks, producing
scholars and teachers without knowledge of the complex world of social reproductive labour,
and ensuring the "masculinisation" of people within the academy. [11]

A third theme in theory and activism concerning gender and higher education both
complicates and resonates with problems illuminated by calls for gender analysis in research
and demands for institutional recognition of women's "dual labour". It is rare to find a
discussion of gender and higher education in Africa which does not mention sexual
harassment and sexual violence as critical sources of injury to women on campus. Most of
these discussions tend to draw on particular incidents. Some of these, such as the story of
Levina Mukasa at the University of Dar es Salaam (see Yahya Othman, 2000), have been
narrated often enough to be invoked as shorthand references for conditions of vulnerability,
fear, confusion, and abuse faced by survivors of sexual harassment and sexual abuse in
many different contexts. [12] Sexual harassment on campuses is explored in more depth in
the third section of this paper. It is raised here as a way of considering what gender analysts
and activists who prioritise sexual harassment as an institutional issue are revealing about
"the core business" of universities. If sexual abuse is prevalent within institutional cultures,
the interests of such abuse demand exploration. The drive against the recognition of
reproductive labour and towards a particular "masculinisation" of students, faculty, and
university managers interacts with institutional climates of intimidation where some forms of
assault are realised through gender difference [13] . Different manifestations of these
gendered assaults are explored by T. Chagonda and A. Gore (2000), R. Pattman (2001;
2002) and M. Mbilizi (2001). As these commentators on masculinities often show,
"womanhood" and "femininity" are systematically policed by peers and authorities,
independent women are overtly threatened, and non-conformity to local gender norms is
regarded as legitimate grounds for physical and psychological assault.

Over-generalisation will lead to naïve conclusions; nonetheless, it seems legitimate to

suggest that the "core business" of most universities involves, first, support for gender
dynamics through which reproductive labour can continue to be unpaid. Secondly, it entails
the promotion of the idea that some citizens can have double or triple loads of work
demanded of them if they are to be identified as worthy of employment, promotion, authority,
and value. Thirdly, it revolves around the surveillance of women's bodies as a legitimate
concern of institutional authority, embodied in student associations as much as in deans.

In a paper given at a conference on Gender Equity, Democracy and Human Rights, hosted
at the University of Zimbabwe, Chagonda and Gore (2000) address issues of masculinity on
the campus. They cite shrinking resources and class-based realities as the ground from
which to make sense of the way different men students are categorised by one another.
"The SRBs (Severe Rural Backgrounds)" come from working-class or peasant backgrounds,
and are expected to be conservative, upholding ZANU positions and "tradition" (Chagonda
and Gore, 2000: 14). "Born Locations" are from the townships, and "cannot afford" the
lifestyle of the "Nose Brigade", students who have attended multiracial, former whites-only
schools and speak English with a very particular accent, or the "UBAs - University Bachelors'
Association" (Chagonda and Gore, 2000: 15-17). SRBs and Born Locations squat in others'
accommodation, cannot afford transport, and often have to work part-time to support
families. UBAs live in residence, and pride themselves on being super-intelligent, anti-
authoritarian, and aggressively heterosexual (preferring to date women who are not
university students or graduates). The paper - which caused controversy at the conference -
dramatically suggests the complexity, tension, vibrancy, and difficulty of "becoming a man"
at the University of Zimbabwe, a task clearly as much a facet of a student's life on campus
as coursework, assignments, and examinations.

There is not much work available in a similar vein, especially in Western and Eastern Africa.
Perhaps, however, it would be possible to speculate that descriptions of gender and higher
education in Africa need to encompass more than the narrative of "gaps". A paper such as
Chagonda and Gore's hints at the titanic negotiations of gender, ethnic and class identity
with which students are engaged in the interests of economic and personal survival. It
makes it clear that negotiating access to marketable "masculinity" and "womanhood" is as
much a part of the educational terrain as battling for access to actual space in a lecture hall,
office, or at a management desk. A gender analysis of university systems leads researchers
into complex and exciting questions about the intersections of global and national, culture
and sexuality, identity and class on the African continent. It is not surprising that - difficult as
statistical data is to collect - numerical indices of sex ratios have dominated advocacy
positions. Work such as that suggested by Mary Mboya (2001), or that accomplished on the
Nigerian university system by Charmaine Pereira (2002), is harder to undertake; its
choreography is dense, theoretically sophisticated and deeply feminist. It is, however, this
level of analysis that will best inform strategies for gender equity, and enable explanations
for resistances to strategy.
Strategies for "gender equity" within higher education

Policies on equity are clearly driven by agendas capable of engaging with history. Such
capacity is often limited by ideological and economic interests, and its boundaries are
determined by deeply contextual issues. The principle of redress, harnessed within the term
"equity", assumes policy-based willingness to understand and change historical conditions
conducive to exploitation and oppression. Given the dependence of many African states on
Northern aid, the foreign demands for "democracy", and the ferocity of internal politics, these
assumptions remain idealistic. While it is true that some governments have taken principles
of equity firmly on board at constitutional levels, implementation of programmes designed to
change the lived experience of the poor, of "minority" populations, or - in South Africa and
Namibia - of people who are black, is weak.

In South Africa, educational imperatives post-1994 primarily involved racial redress, and
debates on equity and affirmative action were (appropriately, for many) dominated by
questions of race. What happened to black women through apartheid-designed education
systems has been explored by Cheryl de la Rey (1997), Mamphela Ramphele (1994), Carla
Sutherland (1994), Pamela Reynolds (1994) and in the Report of the South African Gender
Equity Task Team (1997). But what were called "transformation" policies and processes
largely concentrated upon changing the racial demographics of students, staff, and
management, especially in "white" universities. [14] "Transformation" programmes on "white"
campuses usually involved the establishment of top-level forums, changes to mission
statements, aggressive recruiting of black students, some attention to finding new funding
opportunities for students who were poor and black, concentrated trainings around
institutional cultures in residences and elsewhere on campuses, and - on at least one
campus - high-profile battles around positions in university leadership. The success of these
approaches has been variable; while black student population on these campuses has
increased, black faculty members are few and far between. Much more importantly, perhaps,
the content and direction of university curricula has not been demonstrably influenced by
different constituencies, except for subterranean debates on the need for "bridge years", or
"academic development" (see Mabokela and King, 2001).

In universities, named by national policy as "Historically Disadvantaged," where most staff

and students are black, institutional equity issues have constellated around student poverty,
with "financial exclusion" being the equity issue galvanising most student protests. At a
management level, battles have been fought for nationally-driven policies and resources to
ensure reasonable competition with richer, and more globally-linked, campuses.

Case studies of some South African campuses suggest that, while there have been some
changes in overtly racist institutional cultures, there has also been backlash. (For example,
certain students at the University of the Free State have insisted on racially segregated
residences.) Studies of black women and black men's experience on "transforming"
campuses indicate an on-going sense of being discriminated against, academically and
culturally (see, for example, Fish, 1996 and Ndinda, 2000). Some suggest that language
inequity is the strongest historical force continuing to marginalise black students both within
historically "white" institutions and within global research and scholarship.

Questions of poverty, and of the rights of marginalised populations within a country, have
animated equity debates in other countries. In Uganda, for example, national policy on
higher education demands that access criteria include attention to potential students' ability
to fund their education, and the region in the country in which their families are based
(Ahimbisibwe and Muhwezi, 2002). At the University of Zimbabwe after 1980, equity policies
considered "mature" and "special" entry options as a route to offering war veterans access to
higher education. Demands for "gender equity" thus negotiate with other discourses on
historical exclusions, and it is only rarely that equity strategies fully integrate the meaning of
being gendered into broad-based commitments to "democracy" or "transformation".

There is no narrative on the pathway taken by "gender equity" advocates and policy-makers
common to all African universities. Contextual influences of state, institutional leadership and
ideology, pressure from women's groups in and outside a particular university, and the
dominant economic and political urgencies within a context determine the different choices
possible regarding "gender equity" on campuses. In universities where some research has
been done to document and evaluate gender equity (such as the University of Dar es
Salaam, Makerere University, or the University of Cape Town), it is clear that even the term
"narrative" is too straightforward for the kind of long-term, intricate, political negotiations a
single campus may engage with over many years. While the presence of extraordinary
individuals within and beyond one campus can always be detected, the detailed interactions
of formal and informal bodies of influence cannot be imagined without substantive, local
research (and autobiography).

The most common form taken by formal gender equity policies has been the development of
affirmative action opportunities for women students. In each context where such policies
have been implemented, there is a particular, state-based, story to be told about the way in
which such policies became accepted by national legislators, university managements, and
various constituencies within universities. The story frequently involves government relations
with the World Bank, and Northern aid, and the active pressure of women's movements and
national machineries on women. Since 1990, the Ugandan Ministry of Gender (and the
fledging Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Makerere University) proposed the
following: "All girls who complete 'A' level and apply to join university are eligible for the
scheme and they have to obtain minimum qualification for university entrance in order to
qualify for the scheme. They are then given a 1.5 point bonus over the points they have
scored through examination results" (cited by Kasente, 2001: 4). This scheme was legally
endorsed in 1995 by Article 33, Section 5, of the Ugandan constitution, which specifically
grants women the right to affirmative action.

Since 1997, the University of Dar es Salaam has also implemented policies which admit
women into different departments and disciplines with lower qualifications than their men
counterparts. At the University of Zimbabwe, government policy addressed racial imbalances
in student enrolment through the "Black Advancement, or Africanisation Programme".
According to Irvine Chivaura (2000), although beneficiaries of the Black Advancement
Programme were mostly men, the Affirmative Action Programme was introduced at the
university to address the low overall enrollment of women students and the "gender gaps" in
science and technology in particular. The AAP set differential cut-off points for admission to
faculties, with women's cut-off point being 2 points lower than men's.

Although analysts like Kwesiga (2002: 237) acknowledge that such concrete approaches to
improving poor ratios of male-female students do have an impact on statistics describing
student populations, the gendered costs of such approaches are clear. Resentment towards
women students deepens, and misogynist ideas about the inferiority of women's brains are
mirrored by formulations in official policy documents which suggest women's intellectual
potential should be measured as automatically weaker than that expected from men. During
the Women's Worlds Congress at Makerere University in Kampala 2002, a focus group [15]
of students from different departments concurred that: "The 1.5 was meant to be a help for
girls, something to encourage, but I feel it has turned into something else now." One man
participant said, "At school it was always the girls who were better, it was my sister, she was
my competition, now people say that girls only get in if you give them extra, it becomes
teasing, I would not want to get in that way."
The deep-level backlash against affirmative action designed to increase women's enrolment
seems logical enough when it is recognised that gender dynamics affect both women and
men, and that gendered meanings ripple into society as a network of tension which everyone
negotiates. In retrospect, some affirmative action policies seem naïve, and yet it must be
remembered that facilitating access to higher educational space for women is essential, and
that many activist agendas support such policies from informed convictions about the shape
and ferocity of local and global patriarchies. It must also be remembered that the majority of
African universities have no form of gender equity policy at all, let alone direct measures
calculated to increase female student populations.

There has been much less policy focus on affirmative action when it comes to the
employment of women academics, particularly at senior levels within the university. South
Africans are enjoined by the Employment Equity Act to monitor appointments in order to
redress "imbalances" of race and gender. Yet even here, relatively little weight is given to
headhunting for appropriate women candidates for positions. At the University of Cape
Town, a human resources officer responsible for equity management sits on every selection
committee, but he or she has less formal authority than the faculty members and deans on
the committees.

Another trend in strategies designed to improve gender equity in universities has been an
emphasis on research and teaching which takes gender seriously, and on the establishment
of women's and gender studies programmes, centres, and departments. The demand to
counteract and transform knowledge production within the academy was, as noted in the first
part of this paper, one of the most powerful calls for "gender equity" in the late 1970s and the
1980s. Then, "equity" was perceived as epistemological; what needed redress was, at the
core, an approach to philosophy, history, social science, politics, and culture, all of which
fundamentally obliterated women in Africa. Feminists active here were concerned about
access, but access in relation to the gendered realities of the "core business" of teaching
and research universities, rather than access for its own sake (see Mama, 1996).

Critical initiatives were established at the University of Ghana's Development and Women's
Studies Unit, at Ibadan University in Nigeria, through the Gender Unit at Eduardo Mondlane
University in Mozambique, the Women's Research and Documentation Project at the
University of Dar es Salaam, and at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. In
some universities, this "equity" strategy was pursued by scholars within particular
departments. For example, Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA) originated in the
Law Faculty at the University of Zimbabwe. The strategy was also developed within units
affiliated with the campus but not formally merged with it. This was the case with the
National Institute of Development Research and Documentation, situated on the campus of
the University of Botswana, but until 2000, an independent organisation. The Gender
Research project here both initiated important work on trading, sexual harassment, and
agriculture, and made contacts with faculty within the departments of Sociology, Continuing
Education, and others on the campus. On some campuses, such as the University of Natal
in Durban, South Africa, efforts to initiate gender studies courses within campus took place
hand-in-hand with the development of NGO-projects outside campus structures. The
establishment of the journal, Agenda reinforced university-focused strategies and offered an
independent route towards the promotion of feminist knowledge in South Africa.

Kasente (2001) locates the current policies at Makerere University on "gender

mainstreaming" within the establishment of a Women's Studies Department in 1991. The
department functioned as "located activism", driving teaching programmes hard to
accommodate an increasing number of students, and simultaneously engaging with national
policy-makers, university managers, donors, and extra-campus women's movement
constituencies.
An on-going survey [16] of African universities which has, to date, received information from
24 campuses, reveals that 18 of these have dedicated "gender units" which energise
teaching, research, and contribution to equity work on campus. At one level, the proliferation
of gender and women's studies teaching departments seems questionable; in climates of
radical cut-backs and increasingly tight strictures from many governments on the nature and
direction of higher education, and given the fact that the quality of most African women's
lives has not improved dramatically over the past 10 years, the growth of a "new" discipline
is interesting. It implies that one would need to look at where gender and women's studies
programmes are growing, and what support and pressures have influenced that growth in
order to evaluate whether the presence of gender and women's studies programmes signals
a clear shift towards gender equity. Much of this evaluation would need to take into account
what such programmes actually teach, and what happens to their graduates. It would also
be valuable to reflect on the quality of faculty members' lives and alliances. As Deborah
Kasente shows in her article in this issue, many attest to conditions of gross overwork and a
sense of frustration about the divides between the demands of "institutionalising" gender and
women's studies and the need to be deeply engaged in local gender politics beyond the
campus. Without such engagement, the pulse of campus-driven projects becomes weak,
mis-aligned, and ineffective, and yet, the costs of transforming "dual labour" into "multiple
labour" are mind-numbing.

In my limited survey of the available literature, two universities have committed themselves
to projects of "gender mainstreaming": Makerere University and the University of Dar es
Salaam. Their mainstreaming platforms are different, but both demand top-level commitment
to gender equity, the retention of affirmative action policies (including those which would
strengthen academic women's presence and research profile), regular, monitoring and
reporting, on-going research and linkages with stakeholders beyond the campus, and
attention to sexual harassment in the university.

The concern with sexual harassment responds to the third theme of theory and activism
noted in the first part of this paper. In Southern African universities (and some technikons
and teachers training colleges), issues of "gender equity" have been negotiated more
through attempts to understand and challenge gender-based violence on campus than via
any other single route. This is less the case north of the Zambezi, although the University of
Dar es Salaam took a leading role in voicing protest against sexual harassment as early as
1984, and the Forum of African Women Educators (FAWE) has consistently supported a
research focus on sexual harassment both in secondary and higher education. [17]

Strategies against the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual abuse address "gender
equity" at its core. It is impossible to perform competently as a lecturer, student, or
administrator under conditions of abuse and fear: getting "access" to university space
becomes meaningless as a form of empowerment. Similarly, it is impossible to conduct
rigorous, creative, and dynamic research while combating targeted sexual hostility or
menace: demands for new epistemologies may be a result of experiences of abuse, but they
have no visceral currency in atmospheres of vulnerability and stress. The following section
opens with a brief review of Southern African strategies aimed at developing sexual
harassment policies on different campuses, and goes on to explore cases of "sexual
harassment" as zones for deep analysis of the meaning of gender within higher education.

The 'lens' of sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus

Over the past twelve years, sexual harassment and sexual violence [18] have increasingly
been named as forces worth focused research within higher education, and, indeed, at other
levels of education. A paper issued by African Rights, a London-based NGO in 1994,
collated diverse examples of severe abuse in African universities and schools. Examples
were cited from newspapers, occasional papers, interviews, and workshop reports, and
included 17 institutions in 12 different countries in its purview (see Hallam, 1994). Sketchy as
some of its data was, the paper suggested an almost endemic problem of gendered hostility
towards women and girl students and, in higher education, towards women staff.

In the early 1990s, several Southern African universities began to develop detailed research
on the nature and practice of sexual harassment and sexual violence on their campuses.
These included the Universities of Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Natal in South Africa, the
University of Botswana through the National Institution for Development Research and
Documentation, and the University of Zimbabwe. The first journal articles on sexual
harassment, written by authors such as Thandabantu Nhlapo (1992) and Carla Sutherland
(1991), were published in Agenda, and were followed by reports released from the University
of Cape Town and the University of Natal, and a research-based article from the University
of Stellenbosch (see Gouws and Kritzinger, 1995). [19] All these institutions initiated
research as a conscious feminist strategy towards policy design, a process which in most
cases, took nearly a decade to complete.

Since the early 1990s, more and more institutions have engaged with research on sexual
harassment and sexual violence, seeking to link their findings with educational outreach and
campus-based policy making processes. In an audit of resources for challenging sexual
harassment within Southern African higher education (recently initiated, and not yet fully
analysed), [20] it was noted that initiatives on sexual harassment rooted in early 1990s
activism and research have become somewhat split from later engagement with the
establishment of gender and women's studies programmes. This is not true of all campuses,
but there is generally a tension between these two strategies for addressing "gender equity",
a tension only alleviated by the presence of the same individuals in both strategic thrusts.
The tension is complex: polarisations between commitment to differing zones of campus
work occur (residence administration as opposed to the delivery of academic courses, for
example), and there can be splits between management's concern about the language and
institutional process of policy-making [21] and those "at the coalface" of student health and
counselling services.

Without delving too deeply into the debates around defining "sexual harassment" as part of
policy processes, it may be useful to note that, as a term, "sexual harassment" has been
introduced to us by Northern (U.S., Canadian, Australian, and European) efforts to describe
the type of gender-based violence that occurs within public spaces, particularly work spaces.
Engagement was with forms of gender-based violence not already codified within criminal
law (such as rape or sexual assault), forms of behaviour that demonstrably damaged people
in psychological and physical ways, but which seemed to pass undefined as "violence"
within their contexts. These forms of behaviour sexualised persons without their consent or
engagement, and led to a huge range of actions: sexual touching, communication, teasing or
bullying, threats and insults, practical "jokes", and so on. Many theorists suggested that such
behaviours were part and parcel of cultural permission to violate women sexually, and
created environments which increased the likelihood of rape. Location within a heterosexual
culture, where men have more authority than women do, made it extremely difficult to
distinguish between "normal" masculine (usually) modes of flirtation and courtship, and
behaviour that was criminally offensive and abusive. A great deal of legal argument and
social analysis has been dedicated to this difficulty. The burden of proof in Northern
legislative policies for defining sexualising behaviour as violent and abusive (where it does
not fall into categories such as rape and sexual assault) has lain with two concepts: the
subjective experience of the person targeted by the behaviour and the degree to which the
behaviour was unwelcome or unwanted by that person.
Both these concepts work within the logic of accepted legislation, but are problematic. The
first means that there is a very high degree of flexibility around definitions of sexual
harassment. What one person experiences as violent and offensive may not correspond to
another's feelings about a similar experience. The second means that in order for behaviour
to be found "sexually harassing", there must be proof that it was unwanted. Given that
sexually harassing behaviour often happens without witnesses, the survivor's statement that
she/he "said no" may not be found credible. In addition, many survivors, due to fear or
intimidation and the hope that the behaviour will stop of its own accord, don't "say no"
immediately. The fact that the survivor has been "compliant" once only encourages the
perpetrator to try again.

One form of sexual harassment that has been easier to deal with from a policy perspective
involves quid pro quo behaviour. This occurs where someone is offered employment,
resources, access to opportunities, or other "favours" if they agree to have sexual relations
with the person doing the offering. Because of the institutional power dynamics involved, this
form of harassment is easier to litigate against. The place in which it becomes complicated in
institutions of higher education concerns staff relations with students. All staff are in
institutionally powerful positions over students; this should preclude all forms of sexual
activity between them. There is fierce and on-going debate about the meaning of consent
between a student and a staff member. On some U.S. campuses, such relationships are
either prohibited or monitored by policy; on many, students continue to desire, have
relationships with, and marry staff, especially faculty staff. Charmaine Pereira (2002) has
suggested that it is critical to separate notions of "sexual harassment" from "sexual
corruption". Her argument uses "sexual corruption" as a term which can describe (women?)
students' "harassment" of (men?) lecturers, though forms of "soliciting" for marks, course
entrance, or access to examination questions. Those who accept such solicitation are guilty,
then, of "corruption", which "needs … discussion, instead of being assumed to be just 'one of
the perks' of the job" (2002: 134). Pereira's point is well-taken; the language of policy,
however, cannot currently accommodate the difference between quid pro quo exchanges
involving "a job" for "sex" and quid pro quo transactions where "sex" is accepted as barter
for grades.

Southern Africans, therefore, have moved into policy-making on sexual harassment largely
through the language of Northern activism. While this language may offer valuable
frameworks, it leaves us without contextually-grounded terms and concepts. Much research
and, indeed, activist trainings, counsellings and educational work suggests the need for
context-specific analyses of heterosexual cultures and identities within higher education; the
language of most policies remains, however, akin to European Equal Opportunity
Commission guidelines.

The following case studies, taken from recent papers on sexual harassment and sexual
violence in universities, illustrate the possibility of reading the realities of gender-based
violence on campuses as demonstrations of the complexity of gendered dynamics within the
lived experience of students and staff. The first comes from a paper presented by Nomcebo
Simelane at the 10th General Conference of the Association of African Universities in 2001:

A female student visiting her boyfriend in his room is asked to iron his clothes. When she
refuses to do so, he proceeds to assault her with the hot iron leaving several imprints of the
iron on her body. She is taken to the Health Centre for treatment and formally lays an
assault charge against him. Once he is charged she is pressured by him, his family and
even her own family to withdraw the case. The justification for asking her to withdraw the
case is that he will be expelled. She finally succumbs and withdraws the case. However,
because of the nature of her injuries, the University proceeds to charge him and the
disciplinary court finds him guilty and he is expelled from the University. The female student
completed her programme and later got married to the man! (Simelane, 2001:9) [22]

When presented, Simelane's paper caused some tension; the fact that a case study
concerning sexual abuse ended with a marriage between survivor and perpetrator was
identified by some voices as inappropriate to the work of understanding the damage caused
to survivors by such abuse, and as marginal to dominant narratives of women's experiences
of harassment on campus. While it is true that the case study does not explore the effects of
abuse very deeply, and that any kind of "happy" ending to abusive gender dynamics is rare,
it is not so clear that the "domestic" and "romantic" threads within the case story are
unusual. Another paper, "Sexual Harassment and Female Students in Nigerian Universities:
A Case Study of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria," presented by Mosunmola
Imasogie at a seminar within the Associateship Programme at the African Gender Institute in
July 2002, [23] offers case studies, all five of which describe versions of lecturer-initiated
harassment. One reads as follows:

Lauren is a first-year graduate student who is also employed as a teaching assistant in one
of Professor T's classes. Professor T, who is also Lauren's advisor, is a new faculty member
who recently completed his postdoctoral studies. Sometime during her first semester at the
university, Lauren and Professor T start dating. (Imasogie, 2002: 20)

The paper explains the quid pro quo implications of this case, despite its consensuality, and
notes that there is a very widespread acceptance of men lecturers approaching women
students for sexual relationships. Preliminary research conducted for the paper indicated
that: "Some of the male students…stated they have been harassed and failed by lecturers
interested in their girl friends…one of the lecturers interviewed wanted to know why the
researcher is wasting her time on research on sexual harassment…the lecturer boasted that
he has at least three girl friends at all the levels he is teaching" (Imasogie, 2002:22).
Nigerian contexts are vastly different from South African ones, and yet this material is
reminiscent of discussions on sexual harassment and sexual violence at a recent NETSH
workshop, where participants from "HDU" campuses in the North of the country spoke of
protest marches against "sexual harassment" being organised through men's student
leadership on the grounds that men lecturers were creating "inequitable" environments by
giving women students sexual attention and academic favours. [24]

It would be politically naïve to move away from analyses of sexual harassment and sexual
violence which locate women as the most common survivors of such assaults, and which
concentrate on the devastating effects of abuse perpetrated by men. However, in the same
way that it is necessary to recognise that the most ferocious forms of abuse take place within
the home and within local territories organised, through masculinities, into gang-terrain, it is
critical to introduce recognition of the politics of heterosexual intimacy into understanding of
campus life. [25] Men and women may be segregated on campuses, through residence
architectures, student sporting organisations, hierarchies of authority, and disciplinary
locations. They are, nonetheless, fundamentally engaged with one another in relationships
of sexual economy, friendship, and within trajectories of identity which are often culturally
valued as routes to kinship, citizenship and "a personal future". The shape of these
engagements, in different contexts, demands research.

For many women, "a personal future" in African societies requires permanent, public,
culturally legitimated, heterosexual liaison: marriage. All key theorists on women and girls'
education in African contexts, such as Bloch, Beoku-Betts and Tabachnick (1998); Sen and
Grown (1988); Dorsey (1989); Gaidzanwa (1997); Kasente (2001); Kelly (1987); Kwesiga
(2002); Mbilinyi (1991); Mies (1988); Morley (2002); Rathgeber (1991); Snyder (1995) and
Stromquist (1998) discuss in detail the impact of expectations about marriage on educational
opportunity. While contexts differ radically, Morley (2002) suggests that for many African
countries immediately after independence, the "core business" of higher education involved
national development goals. Conceived within nationalist public discourse as a need for new
citizens committed to new political visions, the gendered nature of "the citizen" began to
emerge in aggressive contestations about women in government, the meaning of the family,
and in debates about education.

Gaidzanwa (1997) argues that women academics at the University of Zimbabwe, after 1983,
found themselves increasingly gendered "away" from notions of "womanhood" appropriate
within emerging discourse on the independent Zimbabwean citizen. Male students frequently
voiced the view that a woman's primary role was to be a wife, and many women students
agreed. Studies on Ugandan and Zimbabwean men students' heterosexual interests
indicate, in different contexts, a similar preference for relating sexually to women without
university education, and Kenyan research suggests that both men and women view higher
levels of education as being dangerous to marriage (see Kanake, 1997; Amanyire, 1983;
Pattman, 2001 and 2002; Chagonda and Gore, 2000 and Mookodi, 2002. Pattman's work
(2001; 2002) also argues that a majority of University of Botswana men students take their
dominance in heterosexual behaviour seriously, and are resistant to sexual behaviour from
women partners who challenge this in any way.

Analyses of women's participation at public, high-status, levels of responsibility in other

zones [26] suggest that attacks against such visible challenges to traditional gender roles
come from both men and women in the shape of insults about "femininity", childcare
responsibility, and sexual desirability to men. Sexual harassment occurs, but so too do
chosen heterosexual liaisons of friendship, work partnership, and sexual interaction. The
point is that, with or without explicit strategies naming "gender equity" as a social, economic
and political goal, men and women negotiate "becoming gendered" through life-long
processes of definition, experience, recognition, rebellion, desire or ambition. Surface
profiles of clear-cut gender "complementarity" are usually retrospective over-simplifications
of these negotiations, and serve particular political interests: nationalist, patriarchal, or
religious. [27] It remains important to identify, theorise and act against patriarchal
architectures; it is, however, also critical that analyses can address the variable, evasive,
and complex ways in which both male and female bodies can come to serve these
architectures' interests.

What acceptance of the gendered complexity within "case studies" (or autobiographical
testimonies) of sexual harassment and sexual violence earns is a lens into institutional
struggles around masculinity, womanhood, sexuality, and violence. Different men's
responses to policies on sexual harassment, the refusal of many women to report instances
of sexual abuse because of fear, the value of heterosexual "dating" relationships, and the
willingness of some women to consent to quid pro quo exchanges all suggest that campus
terrains are not simple sites that are "unbalanced" by gender ratios. They constitute one of a
number of key zones for young (and older) adults, whose "core business" includes
heterosexuality as a major route into resources, stability, identity and citizenship. The two
case studies above illustrate instances of gross abuse of power, through sexual action, and
they also hint at lives within institutions that are not easily permeable to policy-making. More
research on this is needed before implications for strategies on "gender equity" can be
definitively named, but the role of universities in the "core business" of "arranging suitable
marriages", facilitating sexual opportunities for men (and women), and collusion with
patriarchal interests around reproductive labour must form part of contextually grounded
analysis of the conditions of "gender inequity" on African campuses.

Conclusion: "that is radical"

In a recent graduate class seminar on gender and violence, a course which explores
contemporary research on gender-based violence, masculinities, and economic and
legislative change in different African countries, [28] students were discussing the
connections between options for class mobility and gender identity. On the table was Amy
Stambach's article, "'Education is My Husband': Marriage, Gender and Reproduction in
Northern Tanzania"(1998). Exploring Chagga women's negotiation of schooling, marriage,
and gender, Stambach writes: "A Chagga friend's comment has long intrigued me:
'Education is my husband,' she said, in response to a Chagga man's suggestion that she get
married soon…. But Eshimuni (a pseudonym), a 27 year-old graduate who was herself a
successful college teacher, assured him that she would never marry, yet she would (if she
could) have children" (1998:187). One student's response to this paragraph suggested both
admiration and some shock - "that is radical!", she said, using a popular South African
colloquialism, indicating acknowledgement of a certain enviable enterprise and bravado.
Radical, of course, carries other meanings; it can connote political ideas (in several
directions) which run counter to dominant norms, and it can refer to a core, an origin, or root.
This paper has argued that while the history of gender equity strategies in African higher
education illustrates both complexity and courage, it is essential to engage with the radical
implications of understanding gender within cultures, societies and institutions. For higher
education institutions, this would entail a willingness to examine their interaction with
"outside contexts" of marriage, faith, families and identity, a willingness to acknowledge the
direction of their interests in gendered citizenship, and an excitement about the possibility of
building a context in which gender does not have any predicative force over individuals'
access to labour, to authority, to performative presence, or to sexual and reproductive
options.

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